When he got ready to look for a job, after serving in the Air Force and earning his doctorate in music education, Dr. W. Legare “Bo” McIntosh Jr. had made up his mind he wanted to work for a small liberal arts college in the South.

Catawba College was one of the places he applied. It wasn’t until after he had started to work in the music department that he found out his father’s aunt, Annie Fulmer, had been a house mother at Catawba for years.

“It was sort of a surprise to find out there was a Catawba connection,” he says.

It didn’t take long for Salisbury to feel like home to McIntosh. “You find things that you enjoy doing,” he says. “You find people that you like and enjoy and before long, you realize it’s been 20 years.”

After 23 years to be exact, McIntosh is leaving the music department, which he served as chairman for 10 years, to accept the job as chair of the music department at Jacksonville State University in northern Alabama.

It was a difficult decision for McIntosh to pick up and move at age 50-something.

“In life, we are presented with a few opportunities,” he says, “and for me, this was one of those. I had to decide whether I was going to take it and try something new for my last few remaining years (he laughs) or whether I was going to stick on the tried and true.”

His sense of adventure won out, and McIntosh is packing up his books and mementos in his office in the Williams Music Building to take with him when he reports for work on Aug. 1. “It looks worse than it really is,” he says of the boxes piled around his office. “I don’t think it’ll take me that long.”

As a rule, McIntosh keeps a neat office, a byproduct of his days as an administrative officer in the Air Force, when his colonel required the people who worked under him to clean their desks every day before leaving. “You had your ‘In Box’ and your ‘Out Box,’ and they had to be empty,” he says.

Of course, he says they kept their paperwork in the drawers and simply pulled it out the next morning. “But it did impose a certain discipline that you had to keep things a little neater than this is,” he says.

As he is cleaning out drawers and file cabinets, McIntosh says he realizes he could have done without some of the things he saved, thinking he might use them someday. “They say you should move every five years,” he says, “and I’m seeing now why they say that.”

The Chickering piano on which McIntosh has taught lessons to music majors will be among the furnishings he leaves behind.

McIntosh was only 5 years old when he started taking piano lessons. “I kept badgering my parents until they finally found a teacher for me,” he says.

His first piano teacher was an elderly woman who died within a year, after which McIntosh had a succession of different teachers. As a teen-ager, he spent seven or eight summers with family friends in New York so he could study under Edwin Hughes.

“I guess that’s what really convinced me that I wanted to be serious about music,” he says.

Born in Columbia, S.C., McIntosh was the first of Ethelind and W. Legare McIntosh Sr.’s two sons.

He also learned to play the oboe growing up and began playing the organ since he’s been at Catawba.

As a student at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and graduate school at Columbia University in New York, McIntosh participated in ROTC, and was commissioned as an officer before going into the service after graduation. One of his professors at USC used to tell him that there were two things the Air Force didn’t need — preachers and musicians.

During his tour of duty, he directed a drum and bugle corps and the Keesler AFB Skylarks, a 50-voice women’s chorus.

McIntosh was stationed in England for three years and in Germany for three. He earned a master’s in educational counseling while in the Air Force through an overseas program offered by the University of Southern California.

After serving in the Air Force, he returned to Columbia University, earning his doctorate in music education. McIntosh wrote his dissertation on Liszt, whose bust sits on a bookshelf in his office.

“Ithink for all piano players, he is something of an idol,” he says. “He literally transformed piano technique in the way that we think about the instrument.”

But it is Bach who McIntosh believes has the most sustenance as a composer. “I don’t ever seem to get tired of him,” he says.

He was performing a composition by Bach at what McIntosh says was his all-time worst performance. One of his professors at the University of South Carolina had entered him in a competition at Bob Jones University, for which he had selected a Bach prelude and fugue, to be followed by Chopin.

“The Bach prelude went fine,” he says. “The fugue, it starts off with a melody and then the melody comes in at another place and then it comes in at another place, and that gives you all of the entrances. Well, Imade it fine through the first two entrances, and halfway through the third, I got hopelessly lost and so I stopped and started over again.”

The same thing happened again. “The judges were out front,” he says, “and finally, I heard this voice say, ‘Let’s try one more time’ from one of the judges. I did, and Igot to the same place and it fell apart.”

This time, he says, the same voice said, “I think we’ve heard enough, please leave.”

That memory, which is still mortifying to McIntosh, left a soft spot in his heart for students whose memories fail them during a performance, especially when they’re playing Bach. “ ‘Been there, done that,’ as they say.”

Even after years of experience, he says he still gets scared before a performance. “I still have butterflies,” he says. “I still wonder, ‘Why am Iputting myself through this? Why do I have to do this today?’

“You get in the middle of a passage and say, ‘Gee whiz, am Igoing to make it through to the end of this piece or not?’ ”

McIntosh has seen a lot of changes at Catawba over the years, the most significant of which have been the actual physical changes to the campus, including last year’s renovation of the music building made possible by a donation bequeathed to the college by Helen and Jean Paul Williams.

“It brought all the faculty in the music department back together in one place,” he says, “and it gave us a focus that we didn’t have before. It sets the department up to make progress in the future.”

Though he will remember many things about Catawba, McIntosh says the highlights of his career have been the musical programs, including the annual Service of Lessons and Carols Christmas performance. Rosemary Kinard, his colleague in the music department, started the program.“I’ve been the accompanist, the organist,” he says, “and I’ve enjoyed working with her on that.”

The students haven’t changed that much over the years, according to McIntosh. “They come with different skills,” he says. “Now they’re computer savvy and all that, but I still think these students come with an innate curiosity and desire to learn.”

Music students, in particular, are focused and motivated, he says, because they’ve already achieved a certain level of skill when they arrive. Because the curriculum includes at least one one-on-one lesson a week, McIntosh says he got to know his students more than some professors might, and over the years, he has seen many of them graduate and become accomplished musicians, working in churches and for various theatrical companies.

McIntosh, who has served on the board of directors for the Salisbury-Rowan Symphony Guild, the Concert Choir and the United Arts Council, says he will miss Salisbury.

“For a small town, there’s an awful lot of energy in Salisbury,” he says. “There’s interest in the arts. There’s interest in new ideas. There’s a sense of self about the community that is unique to a small town.

“They seem to want to keep the traditions, but yet they’re still open to new ideas. So it’s not only historic, I think it’s progressive as well.”

Jacksonville State University is larger than Catawba, with 9,000 students as compared to 1,300. The music department has 250 students, compared to 15.

“And you probably know about the Marching Southerners,” he says. “That’s probably what they’re known for.”

That and for being the other Gamecocks. When he interviewed for the job, McIntosh says the president, who is a JCU graduate, said he noticed on his resume that he was also a Gamecock, referring to the University of South Carolina.

The difference in the mascots, the president went on to tell him, is that the JCU Gamecock’s tail feathers point upward, while the tail feathers on the USC Gamecock go downward. “With great delight, he told me that,” he says.

When he’s performing for himself, McIntosh says he enjoys playing jazz. “In my next life,” he says, “I’m going to come back as a jazz pianist and sit behind a palm and use a big brandy snifter for all the tips.”

Contact Kathy Chaffin at 704-797-4270 or kchaffin@salisburypost.com .

Travel, Tolkien and a sense of humor keep him going

Favorite book: “For the past couple of years, my reading has been tied with trying to keep up with music or trying to read something that is going to be useful in my work. One of the books I read this year in connection with a course was a Mozart biography by Maynard Solomon which was awfully insightful. Years ago, I used to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ and I would read that about every five years. I’d go through all of those four books, and I haven’t done that in 10 years. If I weren’t involved in getting ready to move, that’s what I would be doing over the summer. I just love those books.”

Favorite movie: “I haven’t been to a movie in 15 years, so I’m out of it. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t keep up with the popular culture in movies.”

Favorite food: “Chinese food.”

Hobbies: “I don’t do enough of it, but Ido like to travel. When I was young, I went through the Middle East several times. When I was in Germany (in the Air Force), we used to go to Tehran twice a week ... That was when the Shah was still in power so you could get in and out. I enjoyed it there, and I went to Lebanon before it fell apart and enjoyed that. I enjoyed going to Israel. I went to North Africa, and enjoyed that. I think one of the good things that Catawba is doing now is with its foreign studies. Last year, (Dr. ) Charlie McAllister and I did a course on English cathedrals and at Christmas, we took a group of students and went over for 10 days to England. He and I proposed a course for Florence for in the fall that we were going to teach. Now he’s going to do it by himself, and he’s going to Florence. I spent a summer in Florence about 12 years ago studying 14th century Florence and traveled through Tuscany, so I was looking forward to going back to Florence again this Christmas.”

Pet peeve: “I don’t know whether it’s when people get their priorities wrong, but people that get upset over little things. That’s the hardest to deal with. People who let minor annoyances ruin their lives. Focus on the big stuff.”

Most embarrassing moment: “I don’t guess there’s any one, it’s a succession of forgetting to be where I’m supposed to be, you know, forgetting appointments or something like that. That seems to happen to me more frequently as I age. Aren’t you glad I remembered today?”

Proudest moment: “I guess I feel the best when I’ve participated in a good performance. I can’t think of any one in particular, but when a performance goes well, it’s just enormously satisfying.”

Laughed the most when: “When the joke’s on me.”

Would like to be remembered as: “Someone with a sense of humor.”